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Monday, August 11, 2014

Impressions #11: Injustice: Gods Among Us

This may
come as a surprised to people who only follow me here, though that
appears to be a distinct minority, but I sometimes play fighting
games when the mood strikes me. Not that I am any good at them, but I
do have a certain fascination with the genre. At the same time, I
also adore superheroes like the ones from Marvel and DC. How do those
two facts come together? Well, Injustice: Gods Among Us: Ultimate
Edition was $8.40 on PSN a while back. For such a low price, I had to
purchase it. Though I have yet to play it with a friend at the time
of writing, I have played through the entire story mode. And I feel
that I have sunk enough time into the game that I can make an
adequate judgment call on.

When it
comes to presentation, most fighting games are stuck in this rut
where either the whole plot is explained by crawling text, or each
character only has one “plot” scene when beating their Arcade
mode. Injustice works differently. Rather than use the standard text
blocks to explain the story in between battles, Injustice uses
cinematics to great effect. The biggest draw is that there are no
loading times between cutscenes and fights. When a fight begins, the
characters take their combat stance, the black bars on the top and
bottom of the screen vanish, then the HUD appears.

The
transition is not always completely seamless, as there are some
instances where the pre-rendered cutscene graphics and the in-game
graphics do not completely match up in terms of quality. The
transition from fighting back to cutscenes also suffers a similar
problem, but is otherwise of as high quality. Fans of the most recent
Mortal Kombat game should recognize this, as it is the same style
used in that game. I personally thought that this presentation
improved the overall flow of the story, and I would encourage more
fighting game developers to use this style. It is much more
entertaining than simply having to read tons of text to understand
what is going on. Because of this, the player is much more and the
fact that a fight could break out at any time, players are much more
engaged and attentive than they might otherwise be.

That
being said, the most important thing in a fighting game is the actual
combat. To that end, the combat is Injustice: Gods Among Us is solid.
Most players of Mortal Kombat and other fighting games will be
familiar with the basic elements. Each fighter has their own moves,
both basic and special. The key is for the player to look for
openings in the enemy's movement and attacks in order to capitalize
with their own combos. Generally, it requires some time to practice
with and against all sorts of characters to learn their unique
command lists and the properties of each command. None of this is new
to anyone who has ever played a fighter before, so it is not worth
going into much detail.

One of
the features that does separate Injustice from its contemporaries is
the way the game handles hit points. Most fighting games separate
fights by rounds, and the player who wins the most rounds in a best
of 3 (or 5) wins. In between rounds, health is completely refilled
and fighters reset to a “neutral” position so that the playing
field is leveled. In this game, the situation is different. Instead,
both combatants have two health meters on the outset of a fight, a
white bar on top of a red bar. A round of combat ends when one of the
health bars is depleted. Further, damage and player position are
carried over between rounds. As a result, while it may be easier for
a defeated player in the first round to win the second round of
combat, they are left at an overall disadvantage because their
opponent will still have an entire health bar in the final round.
This system makes the fights more interesting to watch, as comebacks
are much more impressive. Having said that, the game, for better or
worse, becomes much more tense for the loser of the first round,
while the winner has a less stressful time. This one change does
affect the overall flow by giving an even greater incentive to play
carefully and manage the risk/reward of making bold moves.

Injustice
also separates itself from the rest of the crowd with its Clash
system. Like other games in the genre, fighters in this game can
build up super meter by both giving and receiving attacks. This can
be used to fuel special variations of moves and each characters super
move. More importantly, this meter can be wagered in a Clash. When
one combatant is on their red meter (meaning they have lost a round
already) and they have super, they can counter an enemy attack by
instantiating a Clash. During this event, both players wager a
portion of their super meter discreetly. The one who bet the most
wins the Clash. If the one who initiated it wins, the enemy's move is
nullified and the victor recovers lost health in proportion to the
difference between gambled super meter. Should the attacker come out
on top, the defender will take damage dependent of the same
difference. What this system does is force players to better judge
how they use their super. Players might not necessarily want to use
up all of their super to perform powerful moves because the enemy
might capitalize on their lack of super to outmatch them in a Clash.
Having some saved up for such an occasion is a much more
understandable concept. I do not know if it is enough to really
affect the overall flow anyway, as often the damage from pulling off
a super is greater than the recovery from a Clash, but it is an
interesting attempt at doing so.

One of
the biggest things I felt when playing Injustice, and I do not know
if this just a personal complaint, is that the fighting felt a bit
stiff. It could be because I am used to games like Soul Calibur or
Persona 4 Arena, where animations seem very fluid and flow into each
other, Injustice feels a lot more rigid. While combos can be
developed on the fly in a Soul Calibur game (based on their
properties), the combos in this cannot. Any combos were ones
completely designed and intended by the designers. Combinations that
feel like they otherwise should connect will whiff if they were not
one of the predetermined combinations. Whether that is a good or bad
thing is dependent on the person playing the game. Some people will
adore it, while others like myself dislike it. I do not know if I can
call it bad, but I do think that some fluidity would have been nice.

Overall,
Injustice: Gods Among Us is a solid game. The DC characters are
represented well and the fighting mechanics are solid. Though I did
not talk about the story, it is interesting and holds up over its
entirety. Bringing in new health and Clash systems helps separate
Injustice from other products in the genre. Lastly, the presentation
of the game's single-player campaign gives it a sense of cohesion and
spectacle that other fighting games generally do not equal. For fans
of Mortal Kombat and/or the DC universe, this is an easy
recommendation. Otherwise, you would be okay in skipping it.